Pledging Allegiance

 

I hate to disappoint you, but Betsy Ross did not create the American flag. The creator was the lawyer, songwriter and author Frances Hopkinson, who, a year earlier, had signed the Declaration of Independence for New Jersey. 

We know it was Hopkinson (above) because he actually submitted two bills for his design work – the first one for about $18. But the stingy Continental Congress balked at paying that. So he lowered his price to “A quarter cask of Public Wine”; meaning, the cheap stuff. 

I think he was trying to make a point , but even then he didn’t get paid. The bureaucrats argued that Frances was already on salary, which meant they had already paid him for the design. He failed to pursue his case because he died in early May of 1791, during an epileptic seizure. But then, I don’t want to write a treatise on the vexillology of the American flag. I want to talk about the pledge of allegiance to it.

You see, the pledge was written as a sales gimmick to sell flags. This is pretty big business today, considering about 100 million American flags are currently sold every year. That’s enough profit to justify the formation of the “Flag Makers Association of America”, a lobby group required because American-made American flags are 30% more expensive than Chinese-made American flags. 

But I digress again because my point is that faith in capitalism requires a certain amount of rationalization, and profiting from the symbol of our nation is just another raison d'être. But that particular apolgia was part of the job description for another Frances.

In 1892 Frances Bellamy (above), who was a fired Baptist minister, was working as the publicity director for a Boston magazine called “The Youth’s Companion”.  He was also responsible for planning the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America,  for the National Education Association. And since the magazine had a nice side business going,  selling American flags to schools (their goal was to have one in every classroom),  Frances thought that a pledge for this special occasion would be an inexpensive way to increase the sale of flags. After all, you can’t pledge allegiance to the flag unless you have a flag.

His pledge, published in the 8 September, 1892 issue of the magazine (above), was just 23 words long and could be recited in less than 15 seconds - about the attention span of the average eight year old child. (And a 70 something year old man.)  And it originally went like this -  “I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”  On 29 October that pledge was first recited in American classrooms,  and at the opening of the Chicago Columbia Exposition. Like the Gettysburg address, Bellamy’s pledge was eloquent in its simplicity. But even Frances could not resist tampering with perfection. He added an unfortunate salute.

Well, it was called the Bellamy Salute, but he did not invent it. It was the brainstorm of  James Upham, junior editor of "The Youth’s Companion".  But it was Frances who laid out instructions for what I would call "a salute too far".  They read. “…At the words, “to my Flag,” the right hand is extended gracefully, palm upward, toward the Flag, and remains in this gesture till the end of the affirmation.” Forty years later the extended arm salute would be preempted by Adolf Hitler, and thereafter tactfully dropped from the American pledge.

Not that people ever stopped trying to improve upon the pledge. In 1923 the America Legion, then made up mostly of veterans of World War One, the Spanish American War, and the Philippines Insurrection, decided that the phrase “my flag” was too open to interpretation. So they added an entire phrase, so there would be no confusion about what country we were talking about. The pledge now began, "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” I guess calling it "my country" was too ambiguous.

In 1940, with a World War once again looming, the Hughes' Supreme Court (above) ruled that even Jehovah’s Witnesses could be required to stand at attention and recite the pledge in school, which the Witnesses had argued violated their faith.  On 22 June, 1943 Congress made the pledge the official pledge of allegiance to America - by law.  Because of that new law, the Supreme Court reversed itself, and the "lawful" pledge could no longer be compulsory for Jehovah Witnesses.

Then in 1951 the Knights of Columbus decided the words “Under God” were desperately needed in the pledge, and on “Flag Day”, 14  June, 1954, Congress made that addition official, as well.  The oath now officially reads “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”. The pledge was now 31 words long. And to be honest with you, I don’t think the longer version is any clearer. As a kid I always thought it was God that was indivisible, not the country. The pledge became something closer to the old joke about a camel being a horse designed by a committee.

Consider the oath, just as a piece of language. If the oath were to stop after the word “stands” we would have a simple sentence (“I pledge allegiance to the flag) with two modifying phrases (“of the United States of America”, and, “and to the Republic for which it stands”.) In this case the Republic is the modifier of the flag, which makes sense because the original intent was to sell flags; remember? Not the republic.

But that was not good enough for all those who honestly wanted to improve on the oath, to make it clearer, and avoid confusion and misunderstandings. I'm not sure how many misunderstandings there were, but you know what they say about cooks and broths - the more the better. Right? And this  kind of thinking produced four modifying prepositional phrases on top of the two we already had – making six in all.  How do six modifying phrases make anything clearer?

Besides, is love of country really that complicated? Does more detail actually make things clearer, or more confusing? It sounds as if those seeking more detail, are looking for an iron clad contract they can sue somebody over. Isn’t it enough if your lover says “I love you”?  Does adding a pre-nup increase or decrease your odds of ending up in divorce court?

I guess the basic question is, are you looking for an affirmation of love, or an affirmation of suspicion, giving your heart, or getting protection against having your heart broken? Because, you can’t have both, particularly when you are talking about love of a democracy, which is meaningless unless it is shared with others.  You can't force people into heaven. And you can't force them to love the same country you do. Not just the same trees and rivers and ideals. Nobody else is going to love your memories of what those trees, rivers and ideals mean to you.  Somethings you just have to a love that you share, on faith. Sometimes that's the whole point.

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ABIUARE! Going After Galileo

 

I make no claims to understand the Byzantine logic of Catholicism, but I do feel empathy for Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. History records that it was Bellarmine who was the instrument of Galileo Galileo’s destruction. But at least the Cardinal was not a brainless evil little toady like Caccini, or a Machiavellian social tyrant such as Maffeo Barberini (aka Pope Urban VIII), and they both played far larger roles in bringing down the best brain in Europe since Pythagoras. 

And the Cardinal did write, early the fifteenth century,  a revolutionary sentence “…Civil authority is instituted by men; (and that power resides) in the people, unless they bestow it on a Prince.” Such revolutionary thought could almost have been written by Thomas Paine, a century and a half later, and it speaks of a faith that values logic and democracy. It is a brand of Catholicism that at times today feels nostalgic.

Things began to go ugly in the spring of 1615 when the Dominican monk Tommasco Caccini took it upon himself to journey to Rome (above).  Caccini was very suspicious of mathematics, which he did not understand, and his intent was to throw what he saw as “intellectual money changers” out of the Vatican. 

On the surface Caccini (above)  was complaining about Copernican astronomy, but Copernicus was beyond earthy correction, having died in 1543. In fact this “dreadful fool”, as his own brother described Caccini, sought to overturn the dominance of the Jesuit order in the Church. This was an internal Catholic  "cultural war".

Of course the Pope himself, Paul V (above), was a Jesuit, so Caccini aimed at a stand-in instead; Galileo Galilei. Caccini told the Holy See that Galileo had contaminated all of Florence with his heresies about the sun being the center of the solar system, and the moon not being a pristine celestial orb. Worse, Caccini alleged that Galileo was saying in public that God did not perform miracles.

Caccini was indeed  a “turbulent ignoramus”, as Galileo described him, and Pope Paul V might know that his own nose was being tweaked by the Dominican, but Catholic politics did not allow the Vatican to ignore the charges that had been made. And Galileo was no longer a young energetic young man, self confident and  able to defend himself.

The pope had originally turned to his most dependable cultural warrior, 73 year old Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (above). It had been the intellectual Bellarmine who had out maneuvered and isolated the clever James I of England over his English translation of the bible, and who had prosecuted the magician Giordano Bruno sixteen years earlier. 

They had been forced to put a wooden clamp on Bruno’s tongue to prevent him from shouting heresies while they burned him at the stake (above), but in the end Bruno was silenced. It is doubtful the Pope wanted Galileo silenced so absolutely, but he expected Bellarmine to remove the Flrointine as an irritant, whatever that demanded.

The problem was that Bellarmine understood enough about mathematics to know that Galileo’s numbers were right. When the old and ill Bellarmine interviewed Galileo, which he did three times, he fell under the genius’s spell. In the end Bellarmine provided the Florentine with a letter that allowed him to "discuss" the idea of a sun centered universe, so long as he did not claim publicly that it was not opinion but fact. 

Despite what Bellarmine and Galileo both knew to be fact, officially, according to the Church, the Earth remained at the center of the universe because several Popes had said it was so.  Robert Bellarmine would die in 1624, and later become a saint. But the saint's letter of instruction for Galileo would prove to be a dead letter.

That letter rose from the dead after Pope Paul V died in 1621. He was followed by the brief and sickly Pope Gregory XV, and in 1623 by the energetic and energetically ignorant Pope Urban VIII, aka Maffeo Barberini (above). How Barberini’s mind worked was revealed in 1624 when he issued a Papal Bull, or pronouncement, making it a sin to smoke tobacco - not because it was unhealthful but because it often caused its users to sneeze, an act which Barberini considered similar to sexual ecstasy - which leaves me wondering about Signor Barberini’s boudoir habits during flu season.So, for the next eight years it was war and not sin which occupied Barberini. If he was not fighting battles to extend the Church’s (and his families') dominions, then he was preparing to fight battles. Barberini turned the Vatican into an arsenal, and built a factory in Tivoli to supply it with weapons. And when the Holy See ran short of cannon Barberini had bronze ripped from the roof of that temple to the Roman Republic, the Pantheon, and melted into more cannon. As an unknown sage put it at the time, “That which the barbarians did not do, Barberini did” (in Latin – “quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini”).

But finally, in February of 1632, with the printing of Galileo’s newest book, “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems”,  the prosaic world of ideas captured Barberini’s attention. Seeing criticism of himself in Galileo’s arguments (and, honestly, it seems to have been there) Barberini ordered the book seized and the printer arrested. And he ordered the Inquisition to investigate Galileo.The Church had been at war with dissenters from the moment Christ died on the cross, and by 1542, when Pope Paul III established the “Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition” in Rome, that war had become formalized and institutionalized, replete with all forms of torture, including water boarding, and with all the advantages and disadvantages found in any bureaucracy, even a bureaucracy of torture.

By 1633, when an ailing Galileo was ordered to Rome (he arrived carried in a litter) to face the Dominican Cardinals who had been given responsibility for his inquisition, the machinery of correction had been perfected. To be charged was to be guilty.

Galileo thought his 1616 letter from Cardinal Bellarmine would protect him, but Bellarmine was a decade dead, and instead the Cardinal’s letter would be the clamp used to silence Galileo’s tongue. Galileo was presented with an “official” copy of that letter which included a phrase – “Galileo agrees to neither hold, defend, nor teach the Copernican opinion in any way whatsoever” – that had not been in the original letter, which the old man still had. 

Holding this official forgery Galileo mumbled, “I don’t remember the clause “in any way whatsoever… ”. And then his voice fell silent. He must have understood at that instant that this Pope (and his army of sycophants) was willing to commit the sin of bearing false wittiness to secure Galileo's silence, or his death.

When presented with his false confession the old man signed. To have refused would have been to invite a death by fire. And in the last act of the farce Galileo was required to openly announced his “abiurare”, that he abjured and renounced the idea that the sun was at the center of the solar system. 

Later generations would insist the old man left the court muttering his independence, but that was just wishful thinking. Barbarini used the power of Galileo's imagination, which had once opened the universe to all of humanity, to defeat him and close that universe. He could imagine the endless pain the Pope could cause him. That is not faith. It is obedience. 

In exchange for his “abiurare” the old man was allowed to return to his home in Florence but he was never allowed to write another word on science. He died in January of 1641, blind and gagged. It was a great victory for Barbarini.

It was not until 31 October, 1992 – Halloween, 350 years later –that Pope John Paul II expressed the Church’s official regret at the way Galileo had been persecuted. John Paul admitted that the Earth does indeed revolve around the sun, once a year. According to John Paul II, “The error of the theologians of the time…was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of sacred scripture.”It seemed, at least for a time, that Catholicism would enter the twenty-first century in peaceful coexistence with science, or, perhaps, even mutually supportive.. Cardinal Bellarmine would have been dis-pleased, but I remain  more than a little wary of the sins the church might commit tomorrow, all in God's name, of course.

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PARCEL POST

I hate to tell you this, but, contrary to common belief, we are the ones living in a “simpler time”.  For the first two million years of human evolution the top limit on communication was the sum of the speed of sound divided by the speed of walking, divided by the number, width and depth of rivers and oceans, and the height of mountains and width of deserts separating you from the persons you wished to speak with. Those kinds of obstacles and those kinds of delays made the world a very complicated place.

When the Battle of New Orleans was fought on 8 January, 1815, the War of 1812 had been over since the Treaty of Ghent had been signed on 24 December, 1814. That was three years you needed to refer to,  while thinking about just one battle, because of the delays in communications. How much more complicated can you get than that?

Mail was the first technological invention in long distance communications. Cyrus the Great of Persia invented pony express riders to carry “words” to bound his empire together. According to the first great historian, Herodotus, these civil service riders were so dedicated that “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds”; which is not the official motto of the U.S. Postal Service. The U.S. Postal service has no official motto. Maybe they should have gotten one before E-mail put them out of business. But I'm getting ahead of myself

The next major technical advance in communication didn’t come along until 1792, when Claude Chappe invented a ‘semaphone’ network in France. In his sales brochures he called it a “telegraph” (Greek for “far writing”). It required a series of towers spaced 20 miles apart, upon each of which were erected stone towers supporting two short movable arms connected by a longer movable arm. A Chappe telegraph operator repeated the 174 different combinations of arm positions to relay up to two words a minute. This was such a dependable system that the Swedes kept theirs running until 1880. However, Chappe never saw it turn a profit, for two reasons. First he threw himself down a well in 1805. And second, it never turned a profit. Worse yet, for Chappe’s family, he copyrighted every thing about his brilliant invention except the name.

In 1837 a failed Calvinist minister, a pro-slavery Federalist, a pedantic anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic conspiracy freak named Samuel Fineley Breese Morse, co-opted the name for his “electronic telegraph” which he copyrighted from top to bottom, including the name "telegraph". The first recorded “Mores Code” telegraphed dot and dash was “A patient waiter is no loser”, in 1838.  The more famous message, “What hath God Wrought”, was telegraphed as a publicity stunt in 1844 and was suggested by Anne Ellsworth from my home town of Lafayette, Indiana. She was married at the time to Mr. Roswell, who gave his name to the New Mexico town where, in 1947, space aliens supposedly attempted to communicate with humans. Their message appears to have been the alien equivalent of “Mayday, mayday, mayday.” But, so far nobody has answered that message. 

The perfect expression of this more complicated communication is the traditional or “snail” mail service I grew up with. The complexities involved stagger the imagination. You write a letter, usually by hand. You take the letter to a collection point, a post office or a mail box. A representative of the United States Postal Service (your stand in) and his or her fellow employees then physically carries the actual letter to your friend’s home. There, your friend reads your words from the very paper you once held. It sounds fraught with opportunity for delays and errors, and it is. And yet it worked in America for two centuries. Until the Trump administration. And what is most amazing is that we expected it to work, and complained when it didn’t.  But then things began to change.

In 2005 the USPS (as it likes to refer to itself) processed (i.e. delivered) almost 46 billion individual first class letters. A decade later that number had dropped by over half - to 22.5 billion letters . In the year 2000 they employed 787, 538 people. By 2014 they employed less than half a million. But the U.S. Post Office still sends 7,000 men and women out on the streets to personally deliver 513 million letters six days a week, while costing the American tax payer NOTHING,  but generating $68 billion in revenue. What a bunch of "Big Government" people these "pro-mail" people are.

The ultimate complication of that ancient ultimately complicated communication system was Parcel Post, in which individuals were encouraged to send not only words from one end of the nation to another, but goods as well. The service was started in 1912 as an attempt to encourage economic development in rural America. And it worked.

But the first small flaw in the plan became visible when Postal authorities introduced "live parcel post" - mailing live baby chicks (in special containers) for which were delivered from anywhere to anywhere for just 53 cents apiece. Now, farmers could order chicks from breeders and they would be delivered, cheaply and reliably, right to the farmer's front door. It was a great boon to the egg industry nationwide. But problems arose when some of the little cheeps in every shipment died in their boxes en route, and the customers sought reimbursement from the Post Office. The rules denied the customer’s appeals, but they appealed anyway. What was not noticed at the time, was another  flaw in the logic of “live” parcel post.

The path to Parcel Post ad nausea was first made visible on the morning of 19 February,  1914, when Mrs. John E. Pierstroff of Grangeville, Idaho, loaded her four year old daughter, May Pierstroff (above), into the mail car of a train bound for Lewiston, Idaho, 55 miles away. A few moments later Harry Morris, the train's conductor, stumbled upon the little girl sitting quietly atop a pile of mail bags. Morris checked the 56 cents postage on the tag tied to May’s coat, and since the mother was no where to be seen, allowed the girl to ride in the mail car to Lewiston. There, mail clerk Leonard Mochel delivered May to her destination, the home of Mrs. Vennigerholz,  the girl’s grandmother.

It was the beginning of a disturbing trend. Later that same year postal workers in Stillwell, Indiana accepted a parcel post box marked, “live infant”. Without opening it, they delivered the box to South Bend, Indiana, where the “package” was accepted and opened by the infant’s divorced father. Cost for the trip was 17 cents. The infant arrived safely. The next year a Pensacola, Florida probation officer shipped six year old Edna Neff to her father, 728 miles away in Christiansburg, Virginia. The postage was 15 cents.

The public was unsettled by this mailing of live children, since the percentage of child molesters among the population in 1914 was about the same as it is today. The negative publicity (and a world war) probably prevented another child mailing until 1919. 

That was the year a press agent for the Aluminum Company of America arraigned for the mailing of five year old Marmi Hood and four year old Evan Hedge to their respective scab fathers, who were locked down inside in the company’s plant in Alco Tennessee. 

At the time the plant was surrounded by union picket lines. After a two hour tearful visit, heavily documented by the company publicity department, the children were “mailed Special Delivery” back to the Alco, Tennessee Post Office, where their mothers were anxiously waiting for them. Postage for the stunt both ways was $2.26 cents.  On Monday, 14 June, 1920 The US Post Office issued new rules, announcing that children would no longer be accepted as live parcel post.

The coda to this regulation was the C.O.D. package mailed to an undertaker in Albany, New York. It arrived on Monday, 20 November, 1922,  and carried no “return address”. In the box was the body of a child who appeared to have had died of natural causes. Her tombstone (above),  now weathered by almost a century of acid rain,  once read, "Parcella Post. An infant whose unknown parents sent the little body by mail...buried here through the kindness of individuals”.  How could you call such a world as that, "simpler" than ours? 

As you would expect from people living in such complicated times, the denizens of that ancient confusion were able to predict the problems and solutions faced by our current, “simpler", electronic age. It turns out the philosophical antithesis to Facebook was written in 1854, not long after the Mores telegraph hinted at the self obsessed simplicity which was to follow. 

It was written by that old fogey, Henry David Thoreau. “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys”, wrote Henry David, “which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end…We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” And, what with a recent Texas Governor advocating their  re-secession from the union of states, and a recent Governor of Florida  advocating everybody just go to hell,  it would appear that our modern politicians are leading the way by getting simpler and simpler all the time. 

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